“... on that it did ‘not wish, by any means, to excite or encourage those to commence as Authors, who may happen to fancy that they possess the necessary qualifications’ – a sensible precaution which in the ensuing century had no deterrent effect whatsoever on the swelling crowd of hopeful but totally unqualified littérateurs. The bulk of the fund’s income ...”

“... had been arguing for decades. He did not think highly of their peculiar brand of rhetoric; and may for once have felt that he had acquired some strange bedfellows. Like them, he had come from ‘the Left’ – in his view, a mythical entity whose members believe it to embody all the virtues, however incompatible they might be with one another. Unlike ...”

“... says ‘third-class passenger Daniel Buckley’ admitted seeking safety this way and there may have been others) and a Gothic phantasmagoria of ‘hermaphrodites ... showing their orifices’ in the Turkish bath and dowagers getting themselves whipped under the card table by depraved cabin boys. The official account of an orderly and even ...”

“... democrats who do not believe it is necessary to talk proper to be a social democrat; Gaitskell may well have been mellowing in his last months. Yet unless (as many Tories, indeed, believe) God is a Tory, one can only see the special cruelty of death as pointing up Labour’s chronic shortage of convincing leadership candidates. Arguably, the class and ...”

“... Marxist political systems similar to those in Eastern Europe. And while even such regimes may not be entirely reliable, at least they are less liable to sudden changes because of the overthrow of a regime or the changing interests of a particular leader; and even when this does happen (as in Afghanistan), the Soviets then at least have a pretext for ...”

“... of this first fat volume, so long awaited, it would be ungrateful not to regret that the work may never be complete: Dr Willi Schuh is 82. He calls his book a chronicle, and that is what it is: methodical, sequential, and evenly paced; in genre, the opposite of a poetic monologue. Yet Schuh has hoped in his own way to make Strauss talk: through unadorned ...”

“... context in 1770, with reference (significantly enough) to cricket. The classification above may not be the best possible – people still don’t theorise about games very much – but it does turn up several points of historical and psychological interest. One is that, over the last couple of centuries at most, the world has turned strongly towards ...”

“... Namierites, or even Whigs. Most believe that blooms come best in mixed bunches. They may allow themselves some guarded asides on the psychology of chiliasm, but would reject Norman Cohn’s full-frontal psychopathology of anti-semitism. They probably accept, as true for that decade, Sir Lewis Namier’s vision of the politics of the 1760s as ...”

“... he pretended to quote, who as Reich Chancellor read and reread the adventure stories of Karl May which had occupied his boyhood, who locked himself into his nightly showings of Hollywood films while Germany burned. The would-be creator and composer of Zukunftsmusik, Wagnerian music of the future, was a travesty of the romantic artist, an aesthetic ...”

“... them: ‘This attitude is understandable but perilous … it is historically evasive and may, in the worst outcome, prove self-defeating.’ Why so? Mulhern is quite clear about this. For him, as for, say, a group like the Tel Quel group in Paris, criticism is part of the class struggle, an attempt to overthrow the bourgeoisie and ‘the dominant ...”

“... War and the feverish nostalgia for Edwardian privilege that it set in train; and although one may not have much sympathy for the sound of the upper classes weeping over their losses, it isn’t always easy (or necessary) to resist their sad chronicles of the charm before the storm, with every moment cherished in retrospective anticipation of its ...”

“... odds and is in its way such a surprise. In time, and with time, a critic rather than a reviewer may go some way towards unfolding how Naipaul manages it. Manages to write something which is at once a Prelude autobiography (the growth of a novelist’s mind) and a fiction – this, without Naipaul’s succumbing to the usual temptation of cannily sheltering ...”

“... of her characters, their disease is that useful ailment, a disease of lucidity. Other writers may give us a madness, or a wedding-night, or the reading of a poem, but only Byatt consistently delivers intellectual madnesses, love-making as reflective as it is tumultuous, poems considered with painful experience and the whole resources of a mind. It is ...”

“... about 90 per cent of the territory of the other and both carried out extensive massacres – this may not be easy. A united Korea will inherit not only a Stasi legacy (on both sides), but also a history and memories of violence on a scale equal to that in the former Yugoslavia. Almost every family in Korea lost one or more members as a result of division and ...”

“... sheets’. Jim’s tastes are only slightly more orthodox. The cartoon character Tinker Bell may drive him ‘absolutely nutso’ but primarily, as Abby points out, he’s ‘interested in women masturbating’. ‘Any woman masturbates anywhere, I want to know about it,’ agrees Jim. Jim may be all talk, but at least ...”